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Southwestern Historical Quarterly

secret service, and the Army to justify his original mistake in dismiss-ing the men from the service without a trial. His behavior went farbeyond the limits of propriety and the constitutional prerogatives ofhis office. The biased, dictatorial, petty Roosevelt that emerges fromthe narrative is an unpleasant corrective to the usual picture of theman. One suspects that the author may have come closer to the truth.At the same time Weaver rehabilitates in convincing fashion thesoldiers' most ardent defender, Senator Joseph B. Foraker of Ohio.Normally no friend of reform, the senator may well have been tooclose to some large corporations, but he also retained some vestigesof the commitment of the Civil War generation in the North to theidea of human equality. This prompted him to champion the causeof the Negro soldiers. Like Foraker, Weaver was not satisfied withsociety's judgment on Brownsville and his sobering book should, atlong last, enable history to bring in an honest verdict.University of Texas, Austin LEWIs L. GOULDTalks on Texas Books. By Walter Prescott Webb. Edited by LlerenaFriend. (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1970. Pp. 94.$6.00.)The old truism that a biographer usually reveals less about hissubject than about himself is doubly true in the case of the bookreviewer. Over the years the reviewer bares his ideals about ethics,scholarship, literary quality, the proper purpose of writing, philosophyof history-even his evaluation of his own role in society. All becomepublic knowledge. In this collection of book reviews written by WalterPrescott Webb in the early stage of his scholarly development, LlerenaFriend has provided a finely ground and polished lens, enabling usto penetrate the secret hopes, dreams, and ideals of the great historianand teacher. Miss Friend's bibliographic essay, in spite of her dis-claimer, presents a sensitive and succinct biography of Webb's intel-lectual development to the 193o's. Indeed, the book supplies strongsupporting evidence for Webb's own belief regarding the expansionof his intellect, as he put it, "from a hard-packed West Texas door-yard to the outer limits of the Western World." The book is best readin conjunction with Webb's Presidential Address to the American His-torical Association, in American Historical Review, XLIV (January,1959), 265-281.